


The Undertow That Sweeps Unto The Furthest Shores

by RainofLittleFishes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Badass!Aradia, But you got worldbuilding instead, I know you wanted dialogue for Christmas, John: get trolled, Kanaya: Keep Calm And Revolutionary On, Sollux: suffer from mild body horror entirely unrelated to the usual, Tavros didn't, Tavros: be scoutmaster to a herd of psionic wigglers, at least it wasn't bees, unless you wanted bees for Christmas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-07 12:54:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5457206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aradia And Sollux In Spaaaace:<br/>There was an alternative to everyone dies and Team Charge took it. Resistance can be subtle. Resistance can be running away. When the odds are overwhelming, it's time to change the game. (Also, the humans are fun to troll.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Undertow That Sweeps Unto The Furthest Shores

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Reveille](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reveille/gifts).



Aradia:

You drop out of jump and spin the caudal fin heat shielding out into a new configuration like the blades of a fankind unfurling, pop the lateral units to match, feel Sollux modify the engine level, the ship reverberating to a different rhythm, and you pop back into jump with just enough time to add some artistic spikes, all within two seconds, still riding the hours long fierce wave of exhilaration that a close chase gives you, amplified by the tandem pilot rig, the added danger of simultaneously dodging belt debris and juggling ship mods and the next jump calculations.

Down to the identification and apparent weight and engine class, your trail will in no way match that of the ship that entered the jump half an hour ago. It is an entirely different _class_ than the ship that escaped the station in Alternian orbit half a day and over a dozen jumps ago.

Systems out from Alternia, you left most of your “ship” mass exploded and falling though the atmosphere of a gas giant.

Prior to that you left a false trail out to a corrupt governhorror’s colony (they’re all corrupt, but this one particularly so in a more objectionable way than usual) and you activated the sleeper virus that will confirm his guilt when the valuable cargo will be irretrievable as evidence.

You breathe in unison, and when you reach seamspace again you’re laughing in unison, your deeper abdominally launched rumble and his lighter, dryer hissing laugh rising above it, around you, until it blends into a froth of tingling lace across your mind. The ship computers ping back an all clear, their passive observation of the normal space you just exited only just now calculated.

Outside the ship, swirls of dirt rise above the permafrost, pierced through by needle ice into fractals, fallen cathedrals of extinct cults, the sharp edges of leaves fallen into decay. You laugh and drink it in through your eyes and nose and mostly the well of your inner self, the part that makes you a person and not just breathing meat. Sollux quiets as you do and the two of you fly and you know that he is seeing, feeling, lines of not-light, tangles of code to be straightened, sometimes the triumphant sense that someone needs an exploding computer sort of drubbing.

For you, the triumph feels like finding the first glint or tap of something under the dirt, the potential of something unknowably deep. Unknowable until you dig, dig, dig. Dirt rises. You breathe in the smell of dust that isn’t really there.

You exit the jump in another convenient belt of debris, less icy than the last, spin out another configuration, and jump again, the smells of campfire and Tavros’s hair oil strong in your mind, if not your actual olfactory sensation unit. Sollux sighs, only once, his breath hitching, and you spare him a shoulder punch hard enough to make him yelp. Piles later, only badassery now.

Your shared effort doesn’t flinch at the punch, you could be dead for eons/epochs/millennia/seconds and your powers would drive forward, intertwined by the twin gestalt rig until both of you let go intentionally. You wonder what the ship would do if both of you died in rig. Haunt the Empire like two ghosts in a machine you presume. Continue to acquire information and personnel for the Undertow. Do something you’d never do for fear of culling, though you can’t think what that might be.

How much of you is left if you die in seamspace? Can you die in seamspace? There are stories about ships that made the jump and just… never came back. Are their helmsmen free now? You’ve mediated for, and bartered with, and put down ghosts of all kinds of trolls, learned secondhand all sorts of methods of death and secrets for which someone thought it worth killing, but you’ve never met a ghost in seamspace, even the parts that seem almost hivelike. You’ve never met one in real space that claimed to have crossed back from the jump either. You dig your claws into your palm around the grip of the gestalt circuit bars and the sense of time as a liquid evaporates, coalesces, marches to your heartbeat again. Perhaps, in the between space, where reality is fluid, you’ve met ghosts and failed to recognize them.

In the space outside of space, with both of you so close, you can taste the blood from Sollux’s bitten cheek, the softness where he let others in and is ever unsure of it, of himself. You can feel the itch of his left front hornbed, the one that always burls up faster than the others, and you remind yourself to file it for him, then dismiss the phantom itch.

You can feel an ache developing behind his eyes, like yours, under your shared sense of teeth-bared-and-trail-screaming, and even for two as strong and well-synced as you, you’ve been pushing it in this last trip, and you know that he won’t complain until he’s seeing auras that aren’t there.

You’re almost to your destination and he’s had worse. It’s not that you dismiss his pain, but that you prioritize. He shifts more than he usually does, his back struts ache, his fingers and joints and thoracic cage struts all ping little warnings, familiar from your own experience, though you haven’t made him admit it. He’s working in part from memory as the clouds have started to gather over his eyes, not enough to disable yet, but enough to hinder. If this had been a normal run, you’d have called it off two weeks ago. But. You’re almost there. He’ll be safely hidden away for his molt soon. Safer at least, he could use more weight.

You wonder what he perceives of you in the jump. Your faster heartbeat? The way your hair’s tangled in your earbobs, pulling just enough to remind you that you’ve a body and not just a mind?

Neither of you have laid eyes on any of your frenemies in the flesh in almost a sweep, regardless of how much time you have or haven’t lost to various shenanigans in the space outside space. Sollux spends most of his downtime working, or pretending to, and you’re a two-troll outfit, so you can’t easily drag him out and force him to socialize when you hit seamspace, not for long anyway, even if it is the closest thing to safe that still exists, or ever did.

Being alone together for so long has honed your sense of one another until, even in normal space, you can judge one another’s moods and thoughts by how the other breathes, how you tap your fingers, or where in his body he holds his tension. You are still the two young lowblooded wigglers, burning bright and often scared and always terribly doomed, except you’re not, not anymore. You are grown, or in his case, almost grown, fed adequately, doing important work, creating a future for some of those poor stupid hopeful wigglers, an option outside _die for Her_. It is because you know him so well that you know Sollux needs downtime and will never take it, not unless you force the issue. It is because you know him so well that you will manage to make him take it, and enjoy it, and because you are seldom kind, (but for him you try), you will not make him admit it.

You’re psionic, you can be in two places at once so long as one of them isn’t _quite_ a place, but you’re not able to bifurcate your attention like he can, not well. Not without the sort of helm augments that make you so much meat and lightning. (No thanks, empress, you’d rather be a renegade. Go shit sparkles at some other seadweller.)

Seamspace is strange, you can enter it at one point in the galaxy, putter through a few loop-de-loops or soar screaming through open void or a giant kitchenblock, and, depending on the where, and the how, and sometimes the who, or even _how you’re feeling_ or what you’re thinking about at the time, you can re-enter on the other side of the Empire… or past it. (Terezi and Kanaya found something past it… It shouldn’t be strange, but a part of you thought the Empire never ended… You have no idea how _Kanaya_ , of all trolls, with no psychic gift greater than common sense, found a planet of dual alien races and… a sort of fragile safety. Who knows what other secrets hide here?)

Seamspace is like a knotted ball labyrinth of tesseracts, tied together with metaphors. Or shot through with them? Even in tandem with Sollux, in perfect agreement over your escape route, you know you’re not perceiving it the same way, though your shared experiences, your trust in your partner, make your perceptions at least mutually translatable. This is a big part of why two semi-adults can evade a massive honking empire older than two splits into what are arguably now subspecies. A smaller part is that you’re both _just that good_.

You’re not too proud to admit that the Empire’s willful inefficiency serves your own ends. It’s really hard to share navigational experience when all you have are words and maybe telepathy. Most telepaths can’t understand enough of seamspace perceptions to translate between psionics, let alone for all the length of memory that would be needed to map even part of a sector. Those that are both psionic and telepathic are usually not strong enough in the one to make any difference with the other.

Meanwhile, Empire helms are not equipped to pull a tandem newbie along until the new unit is experienced, too busy falling over in their wires of premature burnout from the siphoning. Officially, it’s stated to be more efficient to use helmstrolls up and then start fresh, but it’s a party line. _(Oh, the secrets you know of dead helms.)_ Of course, they also give the new helms to new captains to break in, and they only get to keep their command once the helm’s up to speed if they can fend off challengers. _(Oh, the secrets you know of even the Empire’s once most fervent beneficiaries.)_

The Empire treats helmstrolls as interchangeable, but it treats captains that way too, even if they can stomp all over almost everyone else until the fateful change in regimes. You never thought that there was alternative, besides run until you die, but there _is_. There is and, secretly, for the first time you’re afraid for something more than your clade and yourself. What if this doesn’t work? What if it _does_?

It is going to work. You won’t allow otherwise, the Empire will have to disassemble every joint and tendon in your body, will have to burn the remains and scatter them sunwards, summon leagues of psychopomps, and still you will not stop. You’ve been infected with hope like a fungal zombie, and you’re spreading these spores as fast as you dare. Twenty-one troll colonies in the past two sweeps, and you would have managed all twenty-two if you hadn’t had to stop for your adult molt half a sweep past. Barring further such developments, you’d still be on the campaign circuit like the other recruiters if you hadn’t hit the motherload and hightailed it with your cargo. Or, rather, hit the _chance_ at the motherload, accessible only at this one fortuitous time, and only by a particularly skilled hacker. The two of you gambled that Sollux could hold out long enough. He’s very stubborn, your dearest diamond heart. You might have lost everything instead.

The empire treats trolls as interchangeable, and there’s only one troll that can’t be replaced. But that’s not exactly true anymore, _is it_?

Other anti-Empire activities aside, your cargo alone could get you dead in a conservatively estimated 69 percent of the empire, with the difference between that and _every_ part of the empire being that only about 3 percent of trolls would know _what_ it is. (The 66 percent difference would be the trolls that would kill you because they wouldn’t know what it is and wouldn’t want to admit it. Trolls are jerks. _You’ve never felt more alive_.)

Your ship is small, like Sollux’s still pre-adult-molt frame, but it is also very, very efficient. No burnout here, not unless you try to tow a battleship from a dead halt to jump in under five seconds. (Which you certainly never pondered. Really. Besides, battleships are so… staid.) Partnered? Your zero-to-jump metrics are _unreal_.  You exited jump most recently as _The Pricklefish_. You reentered as _The Indigo Dartbeast_. Your ship has claimed many names, but privately you think of it as _The Skin Changer_ , after that old chestnut about the creature from the marshes that changes faces to lure prey.

Sollux doesn’t care what you call your ship any more than his bees do. The tiny hive has flourished despite so many trips into seamspace. Or perhaps because of it. You wonder how the bees perceive it and don't expect to ever find out. They're cladish little beasties and don't like to communicate with you, or anyone else outside of Sollux, not unless they're in an extremity of need. 

When you arrive, safely and in an entirely responsible manner, you’re going to steal some honey to swap, drag Sollux along, and spend some quality time sampling the local intoxicants with Roxy. It’s a new world, full of not-trolls and potential, and you’re going to be populating it with your own visions of the future. It seems a good time to drop some stress before someone panics. Maybe Tavros will be free and join you. Maybe even Kanaya, though she never seems to go anywhere without her hanger-on half under her skirts, at least according to Tavros. Is it wrong to introduce a baby lusus to intoxicated trolls? It's not like you'll be telling the wiggler to try it. You've never understood the human reverence for innocence. You don't get nostalgic about earlier times when you were less prepared. 

You are so glad you’re not ferrying some seadweller captain’s virginal first flight. Heck, while Sollux molts you might even convince Tavros’s own little band of hangers-on to bring you sandwiches in exchange for ghost stories so you can keep watch on his cocoon properly. Wigglers are hilarious. You can’t remember being so young. You miss your mother though. Karkat and Terezi insist that general lusii aren’t mission critical. You wonder if they’d still claim as much if they had Tavros’s assignment.

-

You hang within seamspace and wait for your contact, feel the edges of exhaustion encroach, ward it off as sternly as you do lingering ghosts before you rejoin your ship. It will be good to see Tavros once you get on planet. He’s running several projects with the natives and colonists now, and is even fostering wigglers like so many broken-winged lusii. It’s weird, but sweet. They compete with each other and the juvenile aliens to help him, to gain his approval. How strange that the exact same troll would be cullbait on Alternia.

Context.

Too much time drifting in seamspace is making you overly philosophical. You haven’t seen him in the flesh in too long.

Onboard, Sollux is hanging in his cocoon harness slurping a shake, monitoring the ship’s sensors, and tapping away at his current project. If the Undertow can identify and recruit young psionics before Ascension, you can also ferry them away before they get canned. It will take sweeps, but as the supply of helmstrolls dwindles it will curtail the Empire’s range. At some point it will out you. You haven’t asked what happens then. At some point the empress is going to have to die, and that means someone is going to have to help her along. It will be chaos and anarchy, unless you can provide a suitable substitute. Prove your substitute suitable. 

You can hear the tapping of the keys, and, if you concentrate very hard, the sound of Sollux swallowing and the occasional soft curse, the tiniest rustle flex of him adjusting his glasses futilely before he scoots the screen yet closer. You walk around as you do, in the space-not-space that is just darkness with an unidentifiable sort of floorplane, trying to clarify in your mind what is _here_ and what is _there_ , trying to practice being aware of both. Whichever is which. Whatever the nature of seamspace, it wouldn’t surprise you if the clowns really had guessed it, at least in part. Maybe it is the relic of some ancient game between elder gods. If it is, well, maybe gods are more benign beings than you would have guessed. This hopeful thing is contagious.

You can’t harm someone directly in seamspace. You can convince them to tell you things that you can use against them, you can say terrible things to manipulate or hurt them, but you cannot physically harm them and you cannot make contact with someone if you intend them harm, not unless they _allow_ your contact. You can find Vriska. She can’t contact you. Eridan can find you, and so you allow the contact, banter back, and never, ever let him know what you’re doing. At some point you learned to trust him, to a carefully determined extent, but he’s partnered to Vriska and so long as they fly together, he’s a risk beyond what he would be on his own. They are effective agents. You will never forgive her. (You dare not contact their helm. 16 sweeps, olive, no still living quadrants on file. Utterly vulnerable to Vriska’s powers as Eridan is not, only by blood. _It is not fair and it never has been.)_

Eridan won _The Edged Skimmer_ and her helm in a bar brawl and treats them both more respectfully than you expected, keeps Vriska from overclocking him in unnecessary racing, holds the deed out of her gambling, enforces distance between them when necessary, or so Kanaya relates to you. Eridan talks to him as gently as Eridan has ever managed anything, using his hatchname as he has no other but the ship’s. Blythl Slthit, _The Skimmer_ , usually replies. Usually, he even appears to enjoy the interaction, or so report your _own_ sources. A slave is still a slave. Vriska has proclaimed her choice, but you cannot trust her. Perhaps, she’s far enough in with you all to be culled even if she betrays you, but what difference does that make _after_ she ruins everything?

Perhaps it amuses you that Eridan is an auspistice for his shipmate and helm. You’ve never outright disliked him, not like Sollux did, you were business partners for perigees and perigees after all. You’d like to think that you would have made it off planet, would have gotten all of you off Alternia, even without Eridan’s assistance, but that’s not how it happened and you can be careful without being petty enough to deny him credit. Sollux holds a solid disdain for Eridan, firmly outside like, dislike, and hate, but well enough toward fondness to have personal insults for him. You’ve grown to like Eridan more than you would admit aloud. He rants about the difficulty of getting stains out of fabric on a small ship. He rapturously describes luxuries _The Skimmer_ has obtained, often by Vriska’s luck in technically less than legal card games, and relates the intricacies of the negotiations in reselling them elsewhere, with an appropriate markup, of course. He’s becoming dangerously likeable, and, so far as he’s using it for the benefit of the Undertow, you can’t really complain, even if Sollux does.

Terezi updates you as to how things are going elsewhere, the viruses that trickle through the drone populations, the viruses that trickle through the interwebs courtesy of Sollux’s drops. Karkat is always tired and hoarse when you see him. His eyes are brighter than yours now, and he burns like a coal seam fire. She’ll take care of him. She’ll take care of Vriska too, the one is aimed out and the other in. She protects Karkat from the attention that would drain him dry. She protects the rest of you from Vriska. They are both careful balancing acts and the past two sweeps have seen her grow taller but no broader, cheekbones sharp and undereyes puffy with insomnia.

Younger Karkat was always angry and, so, so blatantly emotional that it tired you just thinking of it. Your own emotional territory can only cover so many before you run short of firepower to defend them, but Karkat simply doesn't stop. He’s become the Undertow’s best recruiter. In seamspace, you can open yourself to contact from others, set mental parameters to find even people you don’t know. In seamspace, you can contact anyone else in seamspace, regardless of location, though you can’t necessarily take a ship from the one point to the other, not without knowing all the paths between. A great helm is more than a strong psionic. A great helm has an intuitive gift for finding such routes. There are many good helms and few great ones, though you and Sollux make do, might even manage a combined facility in the top ranks, if that was something you could measure without revealing too much. If the Empire had caught Sollux... It doesn't matter. It didn't happen like that.

The Empire is full of crewed ships, military, supplies, merchants, construction, and, by sheer numbers alone, _some_ of them will be sleeping dry during jump. Not all the crews are happy with their lots or the Empire. A smaller number of those trolls are willing to lay strifekind aside if there’s an alternative. It doesn’t hurt the Undertow that often those are the type of trolls to already know the Irons.

Karkat’s honesty, his promiscuous and instant honest caring for the trolls he meets, are great assets… but another is that it’s easy for trolls that _fail_ to pass his requirements to dismiss the meeting as just a vivid dream. Even a telepath can’t scout him so long as he stays in the jump. It’s treason to support the Sufferer, but it’s _not_ treason to dream of him.

You wait for your contact. In the ship, your eyes are closed, but at the same time you can see directly into your surroundings in seamspace. You could step outside the ship, a few further steps from your physical body, and perhaps you’d fall, or float, or rise, whatever direction that might be, but you wouldn’t suffocate, not unless you managed the jump back into regular space without a ship. You probably wouldn’t even die of dehydration, but boredom. You pass the time dreaming up experiments in ways to shuffle off the mortal coil and if they’d work in seamspace. Not like you’d test them, but your contact is late. Or maybe you’re early. You went through 16 jumps to get this far, though eight would have been overkill. Eight is not your favorite number however, and Sollux has found a preference for 24. You don’t sleep in seamspace if you can help it, even with sopor, so you think instead.

 -

Sollux spends a lot of time online, and always has. Approximately 98% of his voluntary time, not including, of course, getting dumped in the hygiene block by yours truly, his morail/matesprit. Morailsprit. Materail-gal. (That is not precisely _voluntary_ , no matter how melty he gets when you get him into a warm bubble bath dirtside. Oh, _warm water_. Clean, shallow, sudsy, warmblood warm water. Suddenly planets seem _sixteen times nicer_.)

Of all the places that you other half spends time, however you define place when even _site_ is euphemistic, some of the _places_ he spends time have the approximate ambiance of turning over a rock to find parasitic zombie mucous beetles underneath. Mid-meal. Possibly with the faint subsonic whining of their still-living victims.

Of course, that had and has its advantages. Those participating in Alternia’s black market have never advertised their whereabouts freely. And adults might not have been allowed on planet, but that’s not to say that they can’t send shuttles, and credit is credit, on planet or off. Of course it takes time to learn if one can trust the other end. Each bargain is a potential betrayal, and as the stakes slowly ratchet up, it’s always possible to reach that one final deal, the one that loses more than the merchandise. Still, trolls will make deals. Sometimes they even keep them. You have always been careful to thouroughly research your potential business associates.

Tavros lost his chances of a life in the Alternian Empire on a double full moon night, which have a reputation for being lucky, though it could be noted that bad luck is a type of luck too. He lost control of his legs, but not feeling, for good or ill, and not his wits, or his courage. He’s not stupid, he’s never been stupid, however much he had been unable to shake Vriska’s strange obsession. He pulled himself up, hand over hand, halfway up the cliff, past the reach of waves and most spray, and into a hollow large enough to shield him from the deadly sun, though nothing could shield him from the agony in his back and legs. The cliff face there is by no means sheer, but it has never been a recreational journey. Most trolls, those who could not fly at least, would have been dead at sunrise. He did it with just his arms, and sometimes his teeth, in agony. There is little that amuses you so well as people underestimating Tavros. He did not die. 

He was mad. He was scared. He had used the agony of the climb to distract himself and, having achieved relative safety, wished he had something else, preferably nonfatal, to distract further. That was understandable. He was _not_ plotting revenge. For anyone that knows him, and especially if that hypothetical troll knows Vriska too, _that’s_ understandable. He was cullbait now, and survival was his first priority. He had lost his palmtop to the rocks. He hadn’t lost his life. Yet. He convinced the cavemole in the hollow to help him clean his wounds, dried his tunic and used stripes, however salt-laden, to bandage the gashes. When you found him the next night, followed his messengerbird back, he was pale with shock and blood loss, but lucid, wedged upright in an insulating tumble of cavemoles.

He convinced you to help him back to somewhere safe and plan for what comes next. Not revenge, rebuilding. Team Charge will ride again. Really. Promise. You promised. He made you hold your hands out and promise again. This time you didn’t cross your fingers behind your back. You took him to, well, not the safest place you knew, but the safest place you thought you could get him medical attention that won’t end on the end of a drone’s fork. Sollux’s crowded hivestem always made you tense, alert for incursion and attack, but you needed the transport access.

Sollux was miffed to find another sorry carcass in his space, but Tavros was and is your other other half, even if your two halves didn’t and don’t hang out much together. It’s strange really, neither of them in a solid quadrant of yours, the one flush-pale, the other having always been squarely outside your conception of pity or pitch. The closest you ever came to a quadrant with Tavros was ash, and it would never have worked because neither of you could stop trying to protect the other from Vriska, and Vriska didn’t have the sense to realize that being strong didn’t mean killing everyone you could. Except now Tavros really was pitiful, and Sollux really did feel bad that he was going to get culled, and they talked, both your halves, and it felt right.

Tavros is smart and funny, even in pain, and his sly humor would take Sollux by surprise. And when he was in pain, some of his comments were _almost_ _mean_. Sollux found himself more respectful than usual. Well, for a given Captor-definition of respectful, which is only passing familiar with the empire-definition of not-a-culling-offense. You left your clade, cold with purpose but no longer enraged to murderous intent. You didn’t seek revenge. Well, _a life well lived_ might be considered your revenge.

You parlayed Terezi’s guilt into another favor, banked for future need, and parlayed a less comfortable emotion into a hive visit by an uncomfortably obsessed would-be medinjurneer. You made sure to get to Nepeta first, and, hammered between the vise of his moirail’s push, and the pull of his own uncomfortable… appreciation… of you, Equius did what he could for Tavros. In the short term, that was merely preventing the damage from getting worse, then facilitating healing, followed by a mobile sitting device. Spinal surgery was far beyond his current skill, and usually not learned until induction into the guild after Ascension, and then under the guidance of more knowledgeable minds and hands.

Still, he considered it a worthy project, learning such skills, even if the subject could not power so much as a hive appliance. Among other as-yet-to-be-learned skills was the knowledge that _not_ articulating that to “the subject” would have made the following perigees marginally easier. Equius no longer makes you feel uncomfortable, but you are still closer to clade-of-clade then frenemies. 

Ultimately, you were planning a jailbreak. Shuttles that could bring nostalgia-tinged Alternian goods to space could, _can_ , also bring trolls. You just needed to find the right shuttles, with the right destination, one that wouldn’t be worse off than staying to get wired into a helmscolumn. As it turned out, old dead junk is one of the many things old trolls get nostalgic about. You cultivated your contacts. You sold a few things for prices so reasonable as to be bribes, but ones that everyone can save face taking or giving. Elkipede skulls became vogue among the colony governors, and those that were busy groveling at their feet and plotting at their backs, and in certain circles, entirely removed, the sign _Megido_ became known as the most reliable supplier for class A goods. The skulls tested clean for poison and hadn’t so much as a flake of decay to them, clearly freshly caught the hard way. You made deals on planet too. You didn’t need the bodies, just the trophy. That didn’t mean you were going to let any of your efforts go to waste, not when you had so much riding on it: your clade, yourself, your determination not to surrender, and that if you did you’d go down explosively.

When the time was right a full two and a half sweeps before Ascension, there were more stowaways than the initial plan, but you dealt with it. Tavros of course, drone-fated, and Sollux, helm-fated, and Sollux’s shouty friend, Karkat, who was and is just as shouty in person, but also strangely adorable in a way that makes him hemorrhage blatant pitch/pale solicitations that he promptly flagrantly denies all over anyone who so much as mentions his nubby little… everything…

And Karkat, drone-fated, dragged along his not-moirail, highblooded and pan-pierced, more drone-bait, and Gamzee commanded Equius when Nepeta alone was not enough to convince him, and Sollux and Karkat insisted on bringing Terezi in on it, even if you weren’t really against it, and Kanaya followed next, friend to Karkat and, unfortunately, Vriska, and both Kanaya and Karkat knew Eridan, regrettably, you had hoped to keep your dealings strictly business, and the only reason the whole thing didn’t go belly up at some point was because the heiress made herself known and evidently Feferi was sick of waiting on planet as Condesce-bait, so all of the dozen of you ended up in space, though Vriska promptly hightailed it with Eridan to another pirate outfit. Ahem, _“Entrepreneurial opportunists”._ All troll merchants have armaments, or they’re ex-trolls, it’s really just a matter of opportunity and cost-benefit analysis.

Not that ex-trolls are necessarily a bad thing, they keep you one step ahead of the Condesce’s scouts. You have found through experience that it’s more complicated to take the heiress off planet than, say, the assorted truffle box of cullbait and bad attitudes that normally populate the fleet, the sort that have been hunting you since.

Well, you would have gotten bored eventually. The plan has always been _don’t die_. It’s just gotten more interesting since.

 -

You contact coalesces with a soft rush like a breeze through trees, leaves rustling where there are none.

“Hi, Aradia!” John Egbert’s eyes are a bright coldblood blue but his greeting is always warm. You smile back, and you let your teeth peek through, not because you want to intimidate him, but because he _won’t_ interpret it as aggression. Sollux doesn’t like dealing with the humans, but he doesn’t like dealing with most trolls either. It’s not like their hornlessness is catching!

You’ve only met a few dozen of the aliens, but you like them all so far and they’re as honest as they are un-troll-like, at least about the important things. You like John’s enthusiasm, and his moirail Dave’s meandering, almost monotone social-anxiety-run-amuck, and you like their shipmates, John’s the sisters of the sign Lalonde and Dave’s his matesprit Jade.

John’s relationship with his shipmates confuses you because Roxy seems to regard him as a matesprit, and she speaks about other members of her clade like they are moirails, but Rose sounds like she considers John both a matesprit and a moirail, and she’s also made flush and ash overtures to Kanaya. Maybe they just aren’t jealous? Or maybe littermates can share certain quadrants? You’ll ask Roxy later. 

The humans don’t need to transition their ships into seamspace in order to access it, but they also can’t seem to move in and out as quickly as you do. You’ve tried to ask them about it, but John just shrugged, Rose was mysterious, Jade was incomprehensibly technical, and Dave was incomprehensible for an entirely different reason. Roxy had put a digit to one side of her olfactory unit and leaned in and asked you if you wanted to find out _how humans did it_. And, well, if you weren’t going to get the answers you were looking for, then it’s not like you were going to turn down alien porn. Very educational porn, Dave is _much_ more amusing now.

There’s something odd about even the normal space around the star system hosting the carapacian planet and the human colony. The only way to it is seamspace. The only way back out of seamspace once there is to be guided over. You don’t know how the humans first got there, with no one there to guide them. You’ve met some of the indigenous carapacians and they don’t even have space travel. Delicious spicy food, great dancing, and lovely ruins, yes. Space-capable travelcraft, no.

On the ship, your eyes are closed, hands still locked to the gestalt circuit, body now tilted level to reduce fatigue, and you can feel the movement of your respiration, the hard shell of the spaceworm capsule under the back of your left hand. You've mostly given up on trying to maintain awareness in both locations. 

In front of you, John smiles even wider when you tell him you got the goods. He hands you a flexible nonwoven gray textile object and tells you to put it on, doing the little side-to-side excitement dance he did when he taught you about high-five, fist bumps, and the sacred broodmateship meaning of _bros_. You examine it, not sure what he means, and he manifests another, puts it on his head with a little flex-wave of his hand and shoulders. “Tada!” He demonstrates.

You squish it between your horns and catch it as it pops back off, laugh at the look on his face, embarrassed, friendly, he _wants_ you to like him back. How strange it ought to be that they look like trolls. Still, he’s become a frenemy, though you don’t know how you’d name it to the rest of your clade, so you play along, banter with him and put your education from Roxy to use. Humans all bleed red, but their soft pretty skin shades make them blush in nuances. When they recycle their dead, you wonder for what purpose they use such fine leather.

 -

 John:

The Ether, or seamspace, as the trolls call it, is, according to the carapacians, a relic of a previous civilization. The trolls didn’t make it. The humans were even later to the party. The carapacians only ever enter as part of their religious observances. Thing is, it’s just too useful not to use, because anyone, anywhere, can reach out to anyone else, provided both parties are agreeable. So basically instant ET phone home, even back to Earth, so long as someone is in the right phase of sleep or meditation. Or, as Dave prefers since first contact was established and trolls were proven to be more than just strangely consistent dreams, prank calling lonely trolls to be a cocktease. If they even have, you know, _genitals_. Or the same type of flirting. That one oops when Dave called Terezi Pyrope instead of Rose? She freaking followed him _home_. She swears up down and sideways through a tessaract that no one else is likely to use the same method, and, yeah, it was neat to be in on an actual first contact for your generation, you know, in the flesh instead of the Ether, but you really didn’t need to know about the ginormous empire nomming its way through the universe. Even if Terezi is better than Dirk at poker and her partner Karkat has the most hilariously obvious tells of anyone you’ve ever met.

You’re in the Ether with Aradia Megido (also a card shark, she smiles at _every_ hand), and while you’ve checked off your list of questions (all mental, except for how the list is on your handheld and you entered the Ether mentally assuming it came along, just like your clothes, more on that later), Aradia is big on _extracurriculars_.

Usually it’s a friendly interrogation about weird human customs (some are only weird to trolls and some really _are_ weird, you have no idea what the deal is with the tooth fairy or if they have to be your own teeth), and the two of you use it to brush up on your conversational Alternian and Post-Earth St'English. Gee shucks, how’d we hit the third millennia without universal translators? Anyone can understand any language, even body language, in the Ether, but it doesn’t carry over unless you do all the hard work first, as you found when Karkat and Terezi descended upon you with one Kanaya Maryam to discuss an alliance and what it would entail.

So far as Rose is concerned, it entails a threesome of races, carapacians being amiable to all so long as it hurts none, and a foursome in the bedroom. Respite block. Gah. You will never be able to look Kanaya in the face without blushing. It doesn’t matter that she claims not to be a telepath, somehow she must know what you’re thinking. Rose’s sleek cap of hair against hers… cheek to cheek… the just slightly convex and just slightly concave curves that swoop into their hips…

See, sometime after you all came along as the third colony-born generation and received ample social indoctrination in human and carapacian social mores and then had first contact with another alien race and learned about their terrible, horrible, no good very bad empire, _Rose got her first serious lady crush on a short alien geneticist and nursery attendant_. (And if it still kind of freaks you out that those are considered one career among trolls, you’re keeping your mouth shut. You’ve learned something living with the sisters Lalonde. You’ve learned a lot, actually, but that’s one of the big ones, along with _Roxy is never actually drunk_.)

So once upon a time you thought that it was serious when Roxy, Rose and Jade told you and Dave that you were being conscripted for science and sexytimes and that _yes that meant a relationship besides friends_. (Health class did not prepare you for life, especially the combined dirty dishes and on-the-spot trick questions.)

Fortunately, Jade moved out with Dave, you’re better off as friends anyhow, and if Roxy and Rose are more likely to keep you between them when it comes to sexytimes as they are to focus on one another, (and thankfully _mostly_ not put you in the middle of sisterly arguments), you’re not going to complain as long as they’re happy.

Okay, so maybe you're going to defend your territory when someone knees you one with night flailing, but overall, things are downright _copacetic_. (Dave gave you a word-a-day app last wintering. You gave him light up socks that play music. You _did not need to know_ all the intimate details from Jade about what he gets up to while wearing them. Really. He may be prettier than you, but Dave is a very high maintenance beau and you are _much_ better off as bros.)

A distant part of you is still caught in the health class wherein you learned that the first generation of colonists had to actively encourage polyamory for population diversity. That is not the relevant part on repeat in your head. This is: if you produce the bottom, you’re responsible for diapering it. Jade is a first cousin, one of a few dozen, all crazy pants in a way that you in no way deny being yourself. If you combined your genes, there is no possible result other than hellion. Rose and Roxy don't want kids for at least a decade. You are onboard with procrastination, you will _excel_ at it.

So your threesome has been happy, but Roxy has also spent the last four years totally over all three moons over Rose’s alien crush. Four years seems like a ridiculous amount of time to spend pining, apparently mutually, but Rose loftily assures you that she and Kanaya are merely moving at a _decorous_ pace to determine the most suitable quadrantal arrangement. You call bullshit, though you don't dare say as much to Kanaya, she sort of intimidates you like Jane. She might wash your mouth out. But still, bullshit. 

Aradia, your most frequent contact in the Ether, thinks it’s equally funny, though the best reaction by far was from Nepeta. If Kanaya and Terezi are both scary, Nepeta is scary and cute. And, like Aradia, she has no sense of personal space, which, okay, is not terrible. There’s something still a little uncertain about the claws, but she can’t hurt you in the Ether and the more you meet them, the more your brain can deal with it’s-really-just-a-hug-she’s-not-going-to-pull-your-spine-out-your-neck.

Which returns you to your present visit to the Ether, where Aradia and Sollux are not quite yet in range to transition over to your system with the very private payload and you have some time to kill. (Everyone on planet knows of the alliance, but the details, the full plan, are a secret. Even the trolls on planet, all your age or younger, don’t know that you’re not just a safe haven. You’re going to be a new beginning. You can’t wait to see what troll babies look like. They sound disgusting and adorable. And you will _not_ be responsible for diapers.)

This go around, Aradia convinces you to play show and tell, which is how you find yourself pants-less when she straightens up, eyes falsely wide, “rumblespheres” jiggling, and says that her shift just ended and Sollux is coming on duty. She vanishes, fedora dropping, and half a second later you’re still naked while her partner laughs his ass off at your “thquidy mammalian bitths”. Two seconds after that you remember you can just reimagine your clothes and you do, but the sting remains, _Aradia pulled one over on you._ You don’t know how you’re going to avenge your pranking honor, but you will. You must! Roxy will know as soon as she cycles on and your girlfriends might not mind you playing shake it with Aradia, but there’s no way they’ll let you live down getting _discovered_ at it.

 -

Sollux:

You made it off Alternia by the thin slimy biofilm of opportunistic bacteria on the surface of your dentition, excessive or otherwise, at least according to Karkat, and you honestly don’t know any troll that is more serious about oral hygiene than Vantas. (And that selection includes Eridan, who is utterly obnoxious about offering breath mints unrequested.)

There are moments since when you wonder about your life choices. There are also moments when you realize that wiggler Sollux honestly just had no idea about how many sentient beings there were in the greater universe, and how many of them make good trolling fodder.

Watching excessively smiley Egbert dance in embarrassment with his weird mammalian bits flopping? _Priceless_. Especially because the past week of squinting has made you forget how truly bad your eyesight currently is but directly in seamspace it’s like the dust has been wiped off the screen and you can see every gloriously horrible hair and weird mammalian skin bulge and _Glub-glub love a duck_ **_it is ridiculous_**.

You’re going to memory dump it to the ship’s computer and send it to Rolal. You don’t normally waste time with graphics, but this moment of hideous shame must live for eternity.

Aradia gives you the _best_ presents. One-way tickets off of Alternia, death-defying Empire-taunting, someone else's personal humiliation to distract yourself. It was worth switching shifts early, even if you complained about it when she kept prodding you to switch over. 

 - 

Aradia:

Roxy comes on duty just before your ship is in range, and then it’s just a hop and a skip into atmosphere, _The Skin Changer’_ s modifications now streamlined for re-entry. Kanaya is already on planet, has been for a sweep and a half, newly-hatched mothergrub in tow. She volunteered as soon as this plan presented itself, two sweeps ago, just in case it actually worked, and now you’re going to deliver the shipment and go pile Sollux _so hard_. Or possibly just sleep, you can feel the drop approaching as the past full night and change catches up.

On planet, hull pinging with the temperature changes, before he pops the hatch, you catch Sollux up, front to front, and knock foreheads, carefully, he doesn’t have the frontal armaments that you do.

He goes stiff for a second, knocked from that working place into the suddenly-I-can-feel-how-much-I-ache place, _oww_ , and then he hugs you back, squishy interior successfully excavated from protective coating. You rub his left front hornbed with your right thumbclaw and feel him shiver at the small relief of tended itch. You’re tired now, so tired, suddenly, a long night’s work riding high on the challenge of it, dropped by safety to the requirements of flesh and blood and bone. You tuck your chin between his horns for just a moment, and hold for just a moment longer with the added urgency of your now-accomplished task in that he should be entering adult-molt any night now and can’t afford to be caught in Alternian space with psionics compromised. You cut it close. If the shipments had had just one more bureaucratic delay… But they didn't, and you did it. 

He’ll be taller than you. Someone should feed him more, something better than shipshakes, he’ll need it for molt. The both of you savor the moment until fatigue promises to drop you. You sigh. He pops the hatch seal in agreement and elbows you back.

Behind you the bees stream out into real atmosphere for the first time in far too long. If you turned, you could see them complain about ship food, brag about the flower sources they're going to go bury themselves in. They don't talk to you, but you've learned something of them by the long confinement in a small place.

You don't turn around and you don't tell them to take it easy. It looks like you're not going to get intoxicated by anything other than sleep right now, but you plan to be fresh as a composite night's eye flower by the time you wake and if you were planning on bullying Sollux into eating more at the time and taking a long bath together, it really will only be more entertaining doing so while the bees stagger over suffering the consequences of their own shore-leave.

Bees won't pass waste in the hive, so when they get sick, they usually cling to Sollux in equal parts pity-me, fix-it-please, and if-I-have-to-suffer-you-should-two. If it's worse than last time, Tavros can feed them electrolyte solution while you dump Sollux back in the tub. You'll probably stay with Roxy, Rose, and John, but Kanaya's hive _does_ have a better tub. Though Tavros's hive should have been finished since last sweep, so maybe you'll just visit everyone until Sollux molts somewhere and picks by default. Decisions. Too many decisions and none life-or-death. It's stressful and also strangely fun. 

 - 

Kanaya:

 _The Skin Changer_ is too small to have a cargo hold, most of its bulk in the engines and modification skins. Behind the twin rig is a space-tough space-worm capsule, rounded and gray, ridged and rainbowed. In the capsule is a beginning and an end: fertilized drone eggs, genetiworms worth the empress’s weight in platinum... an opaque vial as thick as your thumb and twice as long, contents a bright, tyrian pink that matches another already in your possession. Among your number, you have representatives of every caste, and now you have genetic samples from not one but two tyrians.

Feferi failed to report at Ascension and so the Empress was forced by unknown means to provide means for her next Heir. Force of habit? Her own enjoyment of killing her Heirs? The merest show of supposed fair play? _It does not matter_. You have a sample from the one troll you most need to die, and another from one you need to live. Something to think upon, if nothing else. 

You’ve been three subspecies for far too long. It’s time for fuchsia and violet to mingle a bit more, for psionic to mean gifted and not doomed, for color to be something to which vain trolls coordinate their clothes and not something to die for. The genetiworms will coax the process along faster, spin psionics, empathy, telepathy, chucklevoodoos, clairvoyance, gills and fins out across the spectrum until the colors spread into a continuum instead of the current artificially enforced stair-steps. The genetiworms, when properly programmed, will make drones the guardians of the new Mothergrub, gentle them back into the couriers they once were.

The gift with which your lusus entrusted you is growing strong, hip-high and vocalizing in Alternian and St'English. Hestia frets that her limbs are not flexible enough to sign to your carapacian neighbors. She is the only lusus on the planet and the young of all three races flock to her. She thrives in the attention, and, for the first time, you wonder what your lusus was like as a juvenile.

You wondered, at first, if it was wrong for you to drag Hestia, innocent, far away from the caverns that could best care for her. Your schoolfeedings told you that she would die of contamination on the surface and you spent each day worried as she slept, until Karkat started to target jades traveling briefly away from the caverns. In seamspace, they dream of the Signless and they spill gems of information. So much of your indoctrination was lies.

It took the empress two thousand sweeps to make your people the violent, unstable, traumatized, and caste-bound culture you are. You have challenged yourself to coax a reversal in two generations. It won’t be without molting pains, but no molt ever is.

You will lock your new acquisitions away and contact Ms. Paint and Jane. The both of your new arrivals looks two steps from falling over asleep and no psionic should expend that much in jumps and fail to recoup the calories promptly. Sollux also looks a great deal closer to molt than either of them was willing to reveal previously. Someone should take care of that, and so you will. It would not have been a decision without cost on Alternia, but here the act is considered common. You find yourself beguiled by such, the alien ways and the aliens both, until it is Alternia that is strange.

-

Tavros:

You are glad to see Aradia. And Sollux, too, of course, Though maybe that should be "Sollux, two"?

It's just. Well. You're already keeping track of all fifty-eight psionic wigglers the Undertow's smuggled here, all the companion and stock animals in this settlement, and you have an ongoing appointment with Hestia every wake-cycle, which started as a way to reassure Kanaya and has mostly just become five minutes of leaf-brew and chatting, but still, well, takes time.

So, that is to say, 512 bees with diarrhea was not exactly the souvenir of Alternia you would have requested, if you had wanted anything from Alternia, which is to say, you do not, unless maybe someone brings some seeds for useful, not deadly things and someone else is willing to deal with them, because you already have too many things to do, by which you mean, too many people for whom you are in some way responsible, especially when you are already behind because of the thing, by which you mean your molt, and you are still bumping into door frames, and now the carapacian wigglers all want to climb you. 

-

Jane: Readdress the concept of delegation with Tavros. Perhaps this time it will stick? Must ask around for wiggler-watching volunteers. Ms. Paint manages the herd every fifth day and lets them finger and psionic-paint. Surely someone else can keep them occupied and fairly contained?

-

Roxy: Set new screensaver for Rose and send copy to Jade. Clear out spare room for possibly tempting Sollux to molt there. Reconsider. Add more orphaned cords back in, tilt head, confiscate all of John's cords and wonder how long it will take him to notice. Hmm. Dump all the spare blankets too. Ooh. Add weird animal skull. _Perfect_. 

-

 


End file.
